On March 20, 2006 the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC) solicited comments on its Draft Labor Law. By April 20, the NPC had received 191,849 responses, mostly from workers. It is encouraging to see such engagement by labor in political issues.
The response of foreign businesses to the legislation, though, has been unsettling. After years of throwing up their hands and blaming the Chinese government's weak commitment to labor rights—not their own drive for ever higher profits—for the poor conditions in foreign-invested factories, multinationals are now rejecting the basic guarantees enshrined in the new law.
On behalf of over 1,300 member corporations, the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai denounced the Draft Labor Law as a “step backwards for Chinese economic reforms.”
In particular, the Chamber took issue with articles of the law that limit “probationary” (trial) contracts for new workers, require more extensive severance pay, give the All China Federation of Trade Unions and other worker institutions a greater say over company policies, define any factual labor relationship as a labor contract without a fixed term, and define appropriate circumstances for firing employees.
The American Chamber of Commerce is especially worried that every “ single alteration [to a labor contract] must [now] take a written form,” thereby loading contracts “down with trivial details.”
But the trend until now has been for contracts, especially China's few collective contracts, to avoid any concrete details, leaving companies a free hand to raise and lower wages and work hours as they please. Mightn't the Chamber have a strong interest in maintaining this exploitative status quo?
And could the Chamber's nervousness about new hiring and firing provisions be motivated by the brutal seasonal nature of much of export industry in China, where workers are laid off when manufacturing is low like, as Upton Sinclair memorably put it, a draft horse that is chased away during the winter?
The Chamber complains that the new law will make workers lazy and encourage working class scam artists; it is concerned, it says, with “the basic morality” of the worker. Yet the over 1,300 businesses under the Chamber of Commerce's umbrella appear unconcerned with the morality of the commentary's repeated reference to “survival of the fittest” and advocacy of an ominous industrial order based on “the social reality.”
CLW applauds the government's new legislative openness. We believe it is perfectly reasonable for the American Chamber of Commerce, along with others, to submit their opinion on the new law. There may indeed be sections of the Labor Law in need of revision. We ourselves, for example, hope that the law will give workers more room to independently assert their rights, through strikes and other activism.
But China Labor Watch also hopes that foreign businesses will move beyond voluntary Codes of Conduct and “social responsibility” websites to a real commitment to workers' rights, enforceable by standards not of their own making. We seek from business a commitment to the “rule of law” that goes beyond intellectual property rights and “manager rights” (as the Chamber of Commerce commentary put it) to real human values.
